INTRODUCTION xliii

essays, and appreciations began to appear. In January 1892 he was elected an honorary member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts, “in testimony of the esteem in which the Academy held him.” The honorary degree of D.C.L. at Oxford, offered in 1879, but postponed owing to his ill-health, was conferred upon him in November 1893 by a resolution of Convocation “to dispense with his attendance in the House for admission to the degree with the customary formalities, any usage or precedent notwithstanding.” On his eightieth birthday (1899) he was the recipient, not only of Complimentary Addresses from the learned and artistic Societies of Great Britain, which have been printed in the preceding volume,¹ but of congratulatory letters and telegrams from many parts of the world.

The principal Address was presented by a small deputation at Brantwood. Ruskin was able to see them. “As I read over the terms of the address,” says Mr. J. H. Whitehouse, “and the signatures it contained, he listened intently and with evident emotion. When I had finished he could only utter a few broken words.”² His strength was now ebbing rapidly. The death of his dearly loved friend, Edward Burne-Jones, in 1898, had been a great blow. “One night, going up to bed, the old man stopped long to look at the photograph from Philip Burne-Jones’s portrait of his father. ‘That’s my dear brother Ned,’ he said, nodding good-bye to the picture as he went.”³ Burne-Jones died the next day. Ruskin’s daily walks had been given up, and he was confined to the house, except for occasional airings in a bath-chair on sunny mornings. If the day were very fine, it would be wheeled to a favourite seat, on a little eminence beside the lake, which commands his favourite view over the waters to Helvellyn. But soon even this amount of exercise had to be abandoned, and Ruskin divided his time between his bedroom and the room next to it, to which, when he first came to Brantwood, he had added a windowed turret, whence to enjoy a wider prospect over lake and mountains. His eyesight had failed him for smaller type, and Mrs. Severn bought him a larger-typed Bible, which he read or had read to him constantly up to his death.⁴ But for the most part he sat silently in the turret-room, unoccupied except for gazing at lake, fell, and sky.

It was this love of natural beauty that alone of his pleasures

¹ Vol. XXXIV. pp. 734, 735.

² “At Brantwood, 8th February 1899,” in St. George, vol. ii. p. 61. A short reply which he subsequently dictated is given in Vol. XXXIV. p. 732.

³ W. G. Collingwood, Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 402.

⁴ Ruskin Relics, p. 210.

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